Conventional document processing software has many disadvantages including poor universality, inconvenience in retrieving document information, lack of uniform access interfaces, poor data compatibility and high cost, poor support of transplantation and poor flexibility, imperfect technique for page layout, and limited search means, and so on. PCT application No. PCT/CN2006/003294 provides a document processing system to address the above problems.
The PCT application does not use conventional document processing techniques where both the user interface and document storage are implemented by the same software. Instead, the PCT application divides a document processing system into an application layer, an interface layer and a docbase system layer. FIG. 1 is a schematic illustrating a structure of a document processing system. According to FIG. 1, the document processing system mainly includes application software, an interface layer, a docbase system layer and a storage device.
The application software includes any existing document processing and contents managing software. The application software is in the application layer of the document processing system, and implements operations on a document by sending a command which conforms to an interface layer standard (also called interface standard). The interface standard defines at least one command for manipulating document data, and also defines a manner of the application software sending the command to the docbase system. The interface standard may also be called a docbase standard, and an interface based on the interface standard may be called a docbase standard interface or a standard interface of the docbase system. The docbase system layer is a core layer of the document processing system, and is for performing document processing operations according to docbase standard-based commands received from the application software and returning a processing result conforming to the docbase standard to the application software.
The storage device stores documents and is usually a hard disk or a. memory, or may be a CD, flash memory, floppy disk or magnetic tape, or a remote storage device, as long as the storage device is capable of storing data. The documents stored in the storage device, i.e. the data stored in the docbase system may be called a docbase, i.e., the documents are the data which may be stored and retrieved through the docbase standard interface, The documents are usually called documents conforming to the docbase standard. In other words, the storage format of the documents is supported by the software supporting the docbase standard.
As mentioned above, the docbase system is the core layer in the document processing system. The docbase system, being a type of platform software, provides functions such as storing, reading/writing, parsing, presenting, organizing, security ensuring and searching of the unstructured documents (unstructured data or unstructured information), and can be called by an application software via the standard interface. The unstructured documents processed by the docbase system may include print media information composed of one or multiple pages, or steam media information such as audio or video, or other information.